


army dreamers

by redhouseboys



Series: i'm obsessed with the mess that's america [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst galore, Anti Death Penalty, Capital Punishment, Fighting, M/M, about this moNSTER, all of that wonderful garbage, ask me, dont even, pretty enjolras centric, rallies and all that good stuff, second person narrative (again), sigh, wow but aNGST REALLY, wow jesus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 04:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redhouseboys/pseuds/redhouseboys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire is not here with you tonight and this might be why you hear gunfire every time your bare feet fall against the hardwood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. but he didn't have the money for a guitar

**Author's Note:**

> Wow this thing is a moNSTER A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH WHAT EVEN HAPPENED IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS LONG AND ITS UNEDITED DONT KILL ME.  
> A couple things first. This takes place some couple months after drunk kid catholic, and yes, I did go for second person narrative again, because it's becoming such a habit that it's almost hard to break. Although, to avoid confusion, this time the "you" is our dear Enjolras.  
> I have to thank the wonderful mercy (miserere on here) for basically editing this thing for me and helping me along the way (she even added in a paragraph or two) and helping me develop this AU's Enjolras. She is a wonderful beacon and you should all go love her.  
> Disclaimer I do not own anything.  
> UPDATE: I separated it into chapters because it's way too long for just a oneshot.

Grantaire is not here with you tonight and this might be why you hear gunfire every time your bare feet fall against the hardwood. 

You’ve tried putting on socks and even afterwards a pair of running shoes in order to muffle the chorus of bangs and clatters and ripping skin taunting your eardrums and playing at your mind like anarchist children, but your efforts remain unsuccessful. It’s a well-known fact that death loves to follow you around, and tonight is certainly no exception. 

You’d promised Grantaire that you would be fine to be left alone. You’d promised him, assuredly and with more confidence and firmness than you thought you could muster. That’s why when your fingers reflexively reach for the phone to text or call him or scream for help you force them to retract into your fist and clench around the tattered flags that aren’t there instead (but you feel them there all the same, stained and heavy with your own screams). You traipse into your kitchen then, for a glass of water to wash away the parched dryness in your throat which comes with the smoke and stench of death, and when you enter there is red spattered all across your counter-top. It’s as if Grantaire had taken the liberty of scorching everything with color before he’d left and now it’s burning your irises and you don’t want to see. There’s a man splayed out across your kitchen tiles and his blonde hair looks oddly similar to yours—streaming down his back in matted, bloody torrents of golden chaos and causes—and his eyes are screaming with purpose like yours but the screams of this man’s are vacant because his pulse no longer thrums through him. Your breath catches and you feel sickened when you have to step over your own body simply to get to the fridge, your body which is sprawled out across your floor and swaddled in old century clothing and the flags you’d thought were in your hands but must’ve slipped beneath the veil despite yourself. 

Your head is crying. So you leave the kitchen, and you leave your dead body behind you and you don’t dare touch your phone. Grantaire is at an art exhibit that Jehan had dragged him to and you’d stayed here in order to get some studying done and encouraged him to go out and have fun and enjoy himself and you promised him. You promised. 

When you enter your living room there are guns scattered across your floor and as your footsteps grow heavier, shaky, quivering fingers dance across their smooth metal. 

They turn on you and shoot. 

You dodge the bullets. 

You’ve seen this too many times, seen _all_ of this too many times—this is the war in your head, the daily struggle of living in a time you’re not supposed to be a part of. (Somehow on your way into this world you’d taken the wrong path and ended up here and now time, with her hourglass lips and pretty pink moon eyes, is punishing you for it. Devious and uncoiled. She hates you. ) These bullets have punctured you far too much, you’re ready to duck beneath them now and let them whiz past your head without so much as a scratch. You’ve grown accustomed. 

That should be the sad part of it all, or maybe the sad part is that you don’t find nearly any of this sad enough. No, you’re used to living in it. Constantly there are men shouting and yelling and fighting and dying all about you, scattered all throughout your apartment, ducking behind furniture and obstructions and sizzling your skin with whispers of revolt and tricolors but you have grown to learn, since your early childhood, that none of it is real. It haunts you sometimes—like the image of your dead body in the kitchen just moments before, that’s quite new—but more often than not you go about your daily business as if it is not there. 

You pad your way over to the couch— _pow pow pow pow_ —and plop down onto it with a newly retrieved glass of water and your Political Sciences textbook splayed wantonly across your coffee table, along with every single note you’ve taken since the beginning of the semester. Studying. Right. That’s why you’ve stayed in tonight. You’ve got a huge exam coming up this week that could literally make or break your grade. Focus, that’s what you need now. Complete and utter focus. 

Somebody is shot down to your right. On your left, there’s a yell of triumph. You pluck the book from the coffee table and begin sifting through the pages to find the right chapter. 

For an hour or so, you pore over your notes, plug your headphones into your ears to perhaps drown out the sounds of battle raging all about you, but The Cranberries _Zombie_ isn’t really helping with your mood, so, frustrated, you switch to some indie album Grantaire had forcibly downloaded onto your iPod when you’d been asleep one night and hope that twangy guitarists and sad lyrics will do a more sufficient job at calming you. 

After a while, you forget people are dying in your living room and soon enough the war is reduced to your head again. There are unfamiliar lyrics streaming into your ears—it’s not the indie album, but it appears Grantaire downloaded nearly his entire music collection onto your iPod while he was at it, so, great— _tell me what you know about the night terrors every night_ and you want to snicker because you never gave music your secrets so why does it know you?

Even though blood is no longer slipping through your spindly fingers and the soldiers have marched out of your living room you’re still trembling with the weight of unshed history, so you pry yourself off of the couch and head into your room to retrieve your laptop in favor of your books. There’s only one way to keep that war inside of your veins, and that’s to use its drive and its push and its pull for a cause. (Out of habitual instinct your fingers type the url for your activist group’s webpage in the browser. You spend at least 20 minutes clicking onto the different pages and staring blankly at it, thinking of nothing.) 

To find a cause for your war to latch onto. It’s been hard. You and your activist group—The Friends of the ABC—have jumped from the abolishment of Capital Punishment to advocating gay rights to protesting against fucking animal testing for Christ’s sake, all in a matter of a couple of months, but no injustice seems tangible enough for the motley soldiers ghosting along your skin to grab hold of. There’s just too much in this world that needs fixing and perhaps the problem is that you don’t know where to start. Or maybe it’s because here, in this time period, no one will let you die for anything and it’s making you sick. 

You’ve never understood why different centuries beckon to you each day and why your body and your consciousness and your bones can never be content with where they are. They shiver every time technology bursts to life (though you’ve learned to quell this) and clink dangerously against your skin whenever somebody whispers the date and time or scribbles it down in their margins and it’s terrible. It’s hell. It’s hell not being where you should be. It’s hell knowing that each part of your body knows it but fate won’t let you belong. It’s hell. 

It’s been nearly an hour now of you aimlessly tapping away at your computer, reading the news, checking your group’s Facebook page, emailing Combeferre a couple ideas you’ve conjured up in this short amount of time and also asking him if he’s free tomorrow after class. The remedial tasks help soothe your vision even further and there are more colors then just red, white and blue staining the earth now, so that’s good. You’re slowly easing into normality. Everything is okay. With the very best of luck, Grantaire will be back in two hours or so, as long as Jehan is watching him and making sure he doesn’t drown himself in whiskey tonight. You hope to God he heeded your advice. 

There’s a wretched noise, like the sound of nails on a chalkboard, and you realize that you’ve been scraping your fingers against your skin for the past couple of minutes, as if trying to unravel the death embedded deep within you. Immediately you pull away and shove your hands into your pockets. No. Everything is fine. Grantaire will come back. It’s fine. Fine. You don’t need to die for anything tonight. It’s fine. 

…It’s not fine. 

You’re itching for a rebellion so much so that your bones are screaming and rattling and aching. Revolt is going to burst out of you in a cataclysmic fire and if you don’t do something about it soon you’re going to burn the world down. 

Out of pure instinct and with the blazing sunlight burning its way through your bloodstream you scramble out of your room and towards the cell phone that you’d promised not to touch all night. Though it is not Grantaire you call, it’s Combeferre. He too opted to stay in tonight in favor of his studies, and you hope to God he’ll pick up because if he doesn’t you just might implode and end up drenching your apartment in golden dynamite. Your fingers press the number assigned to him on your speed dial in a frantic flurry of appendages and to your relief, he answers within the first few rings. 

“Enjolras?”

“Hi ‘Ferre.” 

“What’s wrong? Is everything alright?”

“I’m alright. But I need you to do something for me. I need you and Courfeyrac to gather the others. Immediately.” Your words come out in a spitfire, rapid and quick and assured and forceful and burning. Combeferre makes a confused, apprehensive sound on the other end of the line, at a loss for words. 

“Uh….”

“Everything’s fine.” Fine fine fine, everything’s fine, everything everything everything is _fine_ and you _don’t_ have to be in the 19th century because it’s _fine_ and you’ve never shot a gun before anyways (even though you crave that blood and that smoke and that metal) so it’s fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Not fine. _Fine_. “Not much time for explanation. Just get everyone that’s not out at the exhibit with Grantaire.”

“Are you sure about this?” he asks uneasily, his genuine concern clear and earnest through the speaker of your phone. “It’s nearly midnight, exams start this week and Grantaire and Jehan are probably going to be home in about an hour or so..”

Your brow furrows and anger diffuses through your tone. This is the only way. It has to be. You need to force your flames and your bullets and your canons on something positive. You need to do this. How can he not understand that? How can he doubt? It’s fine. It’s fine. You’re sure and it’s fine. “Of course I’m sure. I’m fine.”

“Are you telling Grantaire about this?”

Silence. Soldiers pound against your skull with their muskets, threatening to build barricades against your mind. They’re smattering words of protest across the backs of your eyelids and it’s harder to see and to speak so you refuse to respond but, hey, it’s still fine.

“Enjolras…”

“Just gather as many of us as you can and meet me at the Musain. Now.”

“Okay.”

It’s reluctant, but it’s compliance all the same. You hang up before you or Combeferre can change your minds. 

Quickly, you text Courfeyrac and inform him of your plans, telling him to wake up from the nap he’s undoubtedly taking instead of studying and get his ass to the Musain with the rest. You receive a couple of unintelligible replies of bewilderment but eventually Courf is convinced; you can almost hear his audible sigh of defeat through the phone, which causes your lips to quirk upwards into a daunting smirk. 

Impulsivity will save you. This is it. It’s your time to change things. Tonight. When you unwind and come apart in a flurry of scorching sparks and blistering, shining words of passion and invocation, injustice will be there to _feel_ it. If there’s anything you’re going to break with your disastrous mind and your pounding hands and your willing troops, it’s hatred. 

Yanking your jacket off of its rack and hurriedly throwing it on, you scurry out the door, heart beating a litany of war drums against the smooth skin of your chest, head throbbing with the screams of the suffering dead, footsteps swimming in gunpowder.

Grantaire had said a few nights ago that the nothing he saw never left the world, that the therapy was useless, that everything was useless. It’s time you change that for him. It’s time you change things. It’s time you shake the world and awaken it and bring electricity into its glassy moonstone eyes so that it’s no longer _blind_. 

It’s time for you to unleash the hellfire. 

++++++

 **Courf:** pls explain 2 me why I’m awake rn  
 **Jehan:** I believe that is one of life’s unanswerable questions, dear  
 **Courf:** gaaaah  
 **Jehan:** poor darling. don’t worry, I’ll be home soon  
 **Courf:** yeah, U will be  
 **Jehan:** ..excuse?  
 **Courf:** y else would i b awake? Enj called us in 4 some emergency meeting or smth  
 **Jehan:** what? Why?  
 **Courf:** fuck if i know. said it was important.  
 **Jehan:** Knowing Enjolras, important could range from a wide variety of things  
 **Courf:** mayb he’s havin his midlife crisis 10 years 2 early  
 **Jehan:** wouldn’t be hard to believe  
 **Courf:** i know…ugh i just wanna see u :(  
 **Jehan:** you will soon, dearest. no barriers stand ahead of us, there is simply but you and I to soon be connected by flesh, so that the souls, already merged, have solid connection to earth  
 **Courf:** u just wrote that right now didn’t u  
 **Jehan:** perhaps~  
 **Courf:** ur too cute  
 **Jehan:** oh hush. You’re a ball of wonderment yourself. But….question?  
 **Courf:** answer!  
 **Jehan:** ah…does grantaire know about this emergency meeting?  
 **Courf:** don't think so  
 **Jehan:** should he?  
 **Courf:** debatable  
 **Jehan:** I mean, it’s not my place to tell him if Enj doesn’t want him to know…  
 **Courf:** idk but im at the Musain now with the rest of them and Enj looks like he’s about to burn down a fuckin govt building with his mind  
 **Jehan:** more-so than usual?  
 **Courf:** a lot more  
 **Jehan:** so this must be pretty serious then  
 **Courf:** YES  
 **Jehan:** Enjolras is recklessness incarnate. He’s got an idea, hasn’t he  
 **Courf:** looks like it  
 **Jehan:** I’m worried about this…  
 **Courf:** don’t b. enjoy urself. ur supposed to be having fun with Grantaire. whatever happens, at the least 1 of us could get arrested at a rally or smth. which happens all the time so  
 **Jehan:** you’re right, I know. So I don’t tell Grantaire?  
 **Courf:** hell, I have no idea babe, its up 2 u but if u do it is u who will be facin the fiery wrath of our ruthless leader  
 **Jehan:** audible sigh  
 **Courf:** if i were u, i wouldn’t worry him. besides, combeferre’s not going to let anything get too out of hand  
 **Jehan:** i hope so  
 **Courf:** hey, just calm down and have fun with R, okay? i'll see u as soon as I see u  
 **Jehan:** which is hopefully in a nanosecond  
 **Courf:** hopefully. but 4 rn Enjolras is yelling at me 2 put my phone away …i swear to jesus fuck this is like high school all over again  
 **Jehan:** ah. Parting is such sweet sorrow  
 **Courf:** my little nerd. i love u and i’ll see u soon, i promise  
 **Jehan:** I love you more than the tide loves the moon  
 **Courf:** i love you more than you love flowers  
 **Jehan:** that’s quite a lot  
 **Courf:** thts my point 

++++++++ 

You’re at the Musain and suddenly the soldiers pumping through your body have morphed into physicality, real and chattering and smiling before you in the bodies of young students. They are so seemingly innocent; Combeferre standing beside you, an anchoring hand on your shoulder, his face creased with slight concern, Courfeyrac smiling down at his phone, his face gleaming with unmistakable completion, Joly and Bossuet curled up in the loveseat in the corner, whispering sweetly to each other, Marius sulking quietly at the absence of his Cosette, who has been on vacation with her father for the last week. Eponine perched on the coffee table beside Marius, making quick jibes and trying to rouse him out of his stupor, though his childish, puppy-dog pout never dissipates despite her efforts. Bahorel, leaned up against the bar, sleepless nights stained beneath his eyes and Feuilly, on a stool beside him, absently twiddling his thumbs, hands twitching for a cigarette but never making the leap, thinking, always thinking. They act as if they haven’t been torturing your soul all day. As if they don’t know what they’ve done. 

You shake your head vigorously. No. These are your friends. What is in your head is in your head, not in the scope of reality. Grantaire has taught you this much. If he were here now, he would be slowly kneading his hands into those knots in your shoulders and whispering lessons about learning to distinguish into your ear, soft and sweet as he takes little breaks to trail slow, open-mouthed kisses down your neck and across your collarbone. How wonderful, how easy things would be if he were here but he’s not and if you want sanity, you’re going to have to pretend you feel his presence warm and real beside you. You’re just going to have to pretend, for now, and hope for the best. That’s all you’ve ever done. 

With a deep intake of breath, you let the banging and clatters subside. No one is fighting right now, so they will be quiet. No one is fighting now. 

But they soon will be. 

You almost feel devious for a moment, and you almost like it. But you let it pass. 

Combeferre’s presence flutters behind you, a silent reassurance, and for that, you are grateful. For him, you are grateful. He is the only one who knows, besides Grantaire, about the war. He is wary of it, he knows it’s the reason you’re here tonight, that it’s not just that article you read in the news today that fueled your fire. But you’re too much to touch, too much to reign in, too much too much too much, burning and sparking and seething and bursting, and even he, with his calm countenance and disposition, cannot sit you down or settle you. Not even he. 

The only way you can be tamed is by something just as wild, swirling and cascading into you with contrasting darkness. The only thing that can swallow fire is complete nothingness. 

That’s why you need Grantaire. 

But he’s not here. He’s not here he’s not here. Remind yourself again and again and yet still sometimes you feel him, feel him creeping up on you and smothering you lovingly and whispering to you, silently frantically whispering and whispering but he’s not here he’s not here and you’re fine. You promise. 

Finally, you clear your throat. At this several different gazes turn on you and bore into you with rapt attention and expectance and sheer loyalty. For a moment you want to tell them to run before they too have been scalded, but you don’t. “You’re all probably wondering why you’re here,” you begin instead, and you briefly note that Combeferre’s hand hasn’t left your shoulder, even after you’ve straightened your back and stood tall and proud and forceful before them, something to be reckoned with. He does not flinch away from your heat and your heart aches for the burns that will be imprinted onto his palms later. 

“Damn right we are,” chimes Bahorel, who is now absently replacing the bandages around his knuckles with fresh clean ones. “Care to explain?” 

Clearing your throat, you let your steady, clear voice pull into their thoughts, jumping right into the subject without any further introduction. “As most of you have seen or heard on the news recently, Carter Ray, a 44 year old man convicted of murder, was found guilty and has been sentenced to the Death Penalty this morning.”

Their eyes burn holes into your skull. A few grimaces, shakes of the head, but for the most part, they stay quiet as you press on.

“I’m sure you are all aware of the bare injustice that this is.” A few nods, quiet murmurs of agreement. You feel a fire being kindled, swaying and shifting the atmosphere of the room in a mere matter of seconds. “It’s redundancy and irony is nearly sickening. The government commits murder on a murderer. As if it has the authority to do just what he’s done without turning heads.” 

“It’s stupid revenge,” scoffs Courfeyrac, who’d stowed his phone away a few moments before, after you’d sent him a furious, bone-crushing glare. “That’s all it’s there for. S’not even effective.” 

You feel a sort of spark run throughout the members then, stirring and resurrecting their memories. The abolishment of the Death Penalty had been one of your group’s main fixations for a while at one point, and this trial has stirred up the long-remaining dredges in your minds, fully resurfacing the controversial issue. With it, people’s anger is renewed, and you see it in their eyes, clear as day, as you continue to speak. “Precisely,” you agree, fingers clenched tightly into fists. “And I know there’s not much we can do about that in itself, but since the trial has brought the issue forth once more the people will be more susceptible to us. I propose we go to Phoenix, where it’s undoubtedly busy this time of night, and begin to rally them together against this preposterous government instilment.”

“So, basically,” Eponine recounts, quirking an inquisitive eyebrow. “The more people we can get against it, the more attention we catch from the fat cats up in State Gov?” 

“That’s the idea.”

There is a brief moment of quiet thought, and then, suddenly, “Well, I’m up for it.” Bahorel shrugs noncommittally. “Why the fuck not? Sounds like it’s worth a shot.” 

“Do we still have the signs from that last Anti-DP protest we did a couple months back?” asks Joly. 

Combeferre nods. "I already took the liberty of packing them into my car." 

“Always the prepared one, ‘Ferre.”

“Yeah, ‘Ferre, you know what they say. Preparation is key. Wink. Wink.”

“Jesus Christ Courfeyrac, really.” 

The conversation continues to surge up and about around you, as you begin running frantically through plan after plan in your head, scenarios of this and that kind alike, speeches you could make, words you could say to get the crowd roused and bristling and willing to absorb your fire with eager eyes and blackened hearts. 

Then finally after some of it dies down, Combeferre manages to help you get everyone shuffled into a means of transportation and sent off on their way to the abundant city of Phoenix, Arizona; named after a bird that sizzles and dies only to be reborn again, dying without knowing its ever lived, again and again and again. 

When you and Combeferre finally have yourselves situated in his van—Joly, Bossuet and Courfeyrac sit in the backseat, chatting animatedly—he glances at you warily, lips downturned into a slight frown. His eyes continue to dart back and forth between you and the road for several minutes, anxious, until finally, you burst forth with, “For God sakes, Combeferre, it will not kill you to _voice_ your worries once and a while, you know.”

Combeferre lets out a long sigh, his hands clutching tighter onto the wheel. He whispers quietly, his words falling deaf to the rest of the passengers who are too wrapped up into their own conversations to notice. “I just don’t know if this is the best outlet for _it_ , Enjolras,” he says.

It. It it it. How could he call this thing….this menagerie of tragedy and death and bullets and blood inside of you an..an it?

Your hands shudder but you reign yourself in, upholding your calm and steady composure. Combeferre is just worried about you, like any good best friend would be. Your heart softens a little at the thought. “How many times have I told you that I’m fine, Combeferre?” you ask, a small, reassuring smile gracing your lips. “Don’t worry yourself so much.” 

“That might be the most difficult task you’ve ever given me, but I suppose I’ll try my best.”

The conversation ends there. 

There’s still about an hour and a half left to the car ride, and for you, most of it is spent in heavy silence. Wars are not always so loud. Not at this time, not when the soldiers are swimming in anticipation and hunting stealthily for their targets. 

A gunshot rings sharp and poignant in the heavy night air, and you can’t help the coil of excitement twisting its way into your gut. 


	2. but he never had a proper education

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for the world to feel your fire.

Phoenix bursts and comes alive at night. The people that would do better off asleep in their beds are bustling about the streets, snaking their way into bars and party shops and alleyways, bouncing about the city in their polished uniforms of refined blue and their dull grey eyes. Indulgently, your lips pull up and up and up into a hollow smile. They’ll be reeled in easily, fish on a line, little toy soldiers lined up in meticulous rows before you, ready to march into concrete and twine it into mud, to reduce the world to what it really is when it’s been bare and unstripped. Just one expansive battleground, stretching across air and land and sea. Just blood. That’s all the Earth is. Just sweat and blood and death. 

You can change that though, of course. That’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. That’s your purpose. 

The Amis flit about you, empowered, little flickers of light buzzing towards you, the embers emanating from your flame. They’re marking against the soldiers and pushing them, pushing and pushing and pushing until your names have been scorched into the dirt, there for everyone to remember, to read when they feel desolate, to read when they don’t know which direction to turn. They will see your names and they will know that you are all wild and unbridled and beautiful and ready to change the world with a righteous battle. They will know, and with the help of your brothers, you will make history. 

(In this one city. This one issue. This one rally. It is the only battle you can scramble together right now in this short amount of time. It will have to make do.)

You wonder then if Grantaire is home, if Jehan knows and is stalling him, if he’s found out about any of your antics. Either way, you do not care. Your first priority right now is making sure these soldiers know about the injustice they’re fighting against. It’s time you unsheathe their eyes. The man who’s to die at the hands of the government, the many men and women whose lives have been taken by petty revenge and made acceptable by the titterings of the law, they will be known and they will be heard through your voice, and your eyes. And the war in your head will shatter and splice through the air like a hurricane of violent glass, and it will be good. It will be used for good and if it doesn’t, if it isn’t, then you will know that you have truly failed. 

There’s an upturned crate in the middle of the street, slathered in red paint, and scrawled across it, in all capital letters, APOLLO. Grantaire had made it for you after a particularly harsh protest one night, as a gift to heal the bullet wounds. “Your own little decorated soapbox to get on top of when you preach”, he had said, and now you use it religiously, if only to see the harsh twinkle of electric blue in his eyes and the smirk gracing his gorgeously sharp lips whenever you do. You think then that if Grantaire were here right now, he would be laughing. 

Combeferre gives a silent look, a communication of mind and eyes, and you know then that it’s finally time. Your hands shake with the weight of what’s about to burst out of you. You want them to feel it. You want them all to burn. With firm steps, you step onto the large crate. The bustling street seems to quiet simply at the sight of you, your golden hair and your blazing eyes and your shining skin and twisting lips. They stop. They stare. The boys behind you have sloppily painted signs toted above their heads. Everything is earth-shatteringly quiet. 

Until you come undone. 

“Citizens of Arizona,” you grit out, practically whisper, so that they must strain to hear, so that they must edge closer into you, become you. They move forward like they are the tide and you are the moon, controlling their pushes and pulls, their footsteps and their round, gaping eyes full of shapes and wonder. “Today, there has been an injustice committed.”

They glance behind you at the signs, at the other boys and girls with stone eyes, with faces full of fury, waiting to shoot forth like venomous cobras, swaddling their victims in truth and shouting indecencies at the uncondemned. Courfeyrac grips his sign so tightly that his knuckles are white. Combeferre is nervous, but he quells it by running hands through his hair, shooting you glances every few seconds or so, as if looking at the source of the light does not blind him at all. The people see the words smattered onto your pathetic cardboard and they know what you mean. 

You wrangle them in closer and feel as the ground beneath you morphs into dead grass, yellow and dry and monotone. Smoke. The stench of it clings to the atmosphere. 

“A man of 44, convicted of murder, has been sentenced to death today.” You feel yourself tremble. Clenching your hands into fists doesn’t help. “A murderer is being murdered. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”

There is a quiet murmur amongst the crowd, surging through them like an electric current. Entranced, they look to you as if they are lost, and you are the only cause for them to be found. “The State Government of Arizona thinks it fair that they murder this man, so long as they have the ‘authority’ to make it justifiable.” Now there are brows, creasing, in confusion, in thought, listening to the voice that twists into them, that controls them, that pulls and tugs and pulls and tugs them towards your light like hungry moths. “A murder. An outright murder. But it’s fine, right? So long as it’s done by a government. By the leaders of our state, of our country. As long as it’s them doing it, that makes it perfectly moral, perfectly just, doesn’t it? They have the right to take away a life, right?”

The sarcasm and sheer wrath within you drips onto the ground and stains it in dazzling reds and whites and blues. People are shaking their heads now, hissing quietly, listening, listening, listening, seething, seething, seething. 

“Wrong,” you shout, your voice building and building into a cacophonous shatter. Behind you, you hear one of your lieutenants growl, and your stomach coils and sizzles with something deliciously pleasant, something like power. “That man does deserved to be punished, but to be killed. What right have they to take lives when he has none? What dictates that they are exempt from a law, from a decent construct of society, because they are the government? Then they can kill? That’s morally acceptable? That money, that ridiculous abuse of authority, that’s what makes murder acceptable?” 

That’s when Combeferre chimes in beside you, and the people’s eyes fall on him as his musical voice dances and surges into your own claims, twisting into your fire like ice, freezing them in place so that they are ready to burn. “The Death Penalty has proved to be wildly ineffective,” he begins, strong and solid, like a rock, always the rock. “Studies show that states with the Death Penalty have crime rates that grow consistently higher than those without. Taxpayer money goes towards their murder. The only reason Capital Punishment is still instilled to this day is because of the government’s twisted sense of morality.” 

“An eye for an eye,” you call, and now you feel it, they feel it, unwinding inside of you like an intemperate beast, like lightning, like forest fires, tearing apart the blindfolds of society and scattering the fabric about their quivering hands and feet. It’s crawling and scratching at your veins and your bones and your skin, roaring and yelling within you, making its way up your throat and out to the world in a burning scratch of words. “That’s what they think. But soon enough they’ll have taken all of our eyes and made us blind to their murder and their injustice! Do you want that? Do you just want to be puppets for them to control, aimlessly walking about the world without knowing, without hearing the screams of society? Do you want to be their robots? Do you want them to be able to play freely with your lives, with your children's lives, do you want to be nothing more than a number on a sheet, not even a name, free to be removed with a signature, with their permission? Are you not more than that? Why should they have the right to take your only true belonging away? Is that what you want?”

No, no, no, no, no, flying at you, no after no, shout after shout, cry after cry. The crowd is now moving, clawing at your clothes, at the men and women behind you, smiling at them, throwing things, gone wildly murderous within minutes. You feel them pulling into you and it’s beautiful. Around you, there is gunfire, clattering, pow pow pow pow bang bang bang bang, bullets embedding within the buildings and the skies that have lied to you all of this time, the officials that have kept their people within darkness. The yells have turned to battle cries and everything is chaotic and messy and rampant and glorious. Your hair, long and curled and golden and pulled up by a messy ponytail, comes undone within the fray and streams behind you like a flag, like a banner, made of glittering blood. 

“Then we’ll take this no longer!” shouts Courfeyrac behind you, and he steps forward towards Combeferre and they take each other’s hands and raise them, high, like a torch, like a starter, like a prize. The people are scrabbling at each other, trying to join, grappling at the extra signs that you’d towed along on your way and jumping into the scope. “We will stand and fight against them!”

“The government cannot commit murder!” and that’s Eponine, who’s standing beside a slightly shaken but mostly solid Marius, her voice clear and sharp and high and strong above the shouts of agreement. 

Feuilly’s voice rings clear in quick succession. “They too are killers, and it’s time they face their victims head on!”

An uproarious clatter of applause and screaming and crackling and sizzling and burning. Bombs, cannons, guns, they all fire, one after another after another, bang clatter pow bang, shifting your feet and the ground under it, slanting your vision into fragmented lines. There’s blood now, there and here and everywhere, people lying on the ground, dying, the unnamed faces of constricting authority slowly running out of air, and you’re laughing, and smiling, and you are wild and beautiful and the people are grinning back at you.

Everything is perfect, because they’re stripping back tarmac and revealing truth and honesty and light and the war that’s in you and in the world. They’re wearing uniforms, uniforms stained with blood, made of blood, and they’re crying and shouting and hurling things at you. You love them. They’re going to fight for you and you love them for that. 

Until. 

“You’re all fucking disgusting.”

The crowd murmurs and pumps and dies, for a quiet moment. They part like the Red Sea, magnetic, to reveal a man not much older than you, dressed in a ratty sweatshirt and jeans. He stumbles forward, pointing an accusing finger in your direction, a sneer drawn across his pale features. You stay silent. 

“You may think you’re right,” he starts, and your mouth twists into a thin line and your gut twists and your eyes twist and who the hell does this man think he is, challenging you like this? Does he want to die with the stray bullets of your soldiers? Does he want to succumb to the war in your veins, to the battlefield world, to the clipped fields beneath you all? “But just wait. Just wait until it happens.”

You can barely grit it out through your teeth, because you feel too heavy with everything to speak. But it comes out all the same, animalistic and terrifying. “Until _what_ happens?”

His eyes shine, for a moment, and the crowd is staring at you, expectantly, at him, expectantly, so quiet, so contrasting to their earlier madness, it’s almost sickening. Their guns have been lowered. Their uniforms are not so stained. But you, you are blazing. “Think about the person you love most in the world. I want you to picture her or him or whatever, right now. Don’t say. Just think.”

You try to bite back the urge to fall beneath his orders, but despite your efforts your heart pulses and a whisper of _Grantaire_ thrums through your bones and rattles and shakes them, visions of gorgeous matted curls of ink and spiraling tattoos and paint and startling blue, eyes like glass and ice and mirrors darting across your eyes. He doesn’t respond, simply waits, and finally, you spit at him, like acid, scorching, “So?”

“Now picture them dead.”

You feel empty immediately. 

“Doesn’t feel so good, does it?” he asks, scathingly, as if expecting you to respond. You don’t. So he continues, and you boil. And wind. And twist. And sift. And everything feels like it’s going to explode. No. No no no. You promised. You promised. Use it for good. Only good. He keeps speaking. “Now imagine some sick bastard, some disgusting son of a bitch, killed that person. Didn’t even know their name, but he killed them anyway. For easy money. For fun. For whatever the hell he wanted. And you want to let that bastard live?” At this, your body screams, shivers with a ragged _no_ , and doubt slithers into you. You want to kick it. Want to fight it. Want to kill it. “For killing your love? For taking that person away from you? You want to just live in the world knowing that he’s going to be alive, when the closest thing to you no longer is?”

The quiet is deafening. The vigor of the crowd is dying into angry murmurs, some shouts of protest, little bits and snippets of conversation, nothing more than that. It’s as if you’ve absorbed all of the fire you’ve created and now you’re ready to feel blood between your fingers and taste it on the tip of your tongue and you want to use it. War. Thump thump. In your veins. Thump thump. In your head. Thump thump. In your heart. Thump thump. Bang bang. Pow pow. The soldiers are in your head again and they’re yelling, yelling yelling yelling, don’t let him don’t let him don’t let him, hurt him hurt him hurt him. He is the enemy. He is your target. Enemy. Enemy enemy enemy. 

It takes almost all of your willpower to restrain yourself merely to words. “I would feel better knowing that he spends eternity slowly withering away, rather than escaping with a quick and painless death.” 

The people growl again, grow and rise and turn towards you, pumping their fists in the air and screeching their agreements. They are accepting and powerful again, feel your heat again. Yet those beside you, Combeferre and Courfeyrac and Bahorel and Feuilly and Joly and Bossuet and Eponine and Marius, they grow cold and still and fearful and wide-eyed. 

The sound of your voice, so cold and full of blood, stuns them into silence. Never have you been so murderous. Not once. 

“Digusting, the lot of you,” utters the young man, his green eyes hard and steely. You want to scrape the light out of his eyes, and this thought momentarily startles you but it doesn’t last long, because all you can see is his clothes smeared in the color of the enemy and hear the doldrums of war, the drum-lines and the yells and the chaos and the smoke and the fluids of death and he, he is killing all of your soldiers, killing Grantaire, he is killing Grantaire. “You yourselves all deserve to die if you believe any of what you’re saying is right.”

_Enemy enemy enemy._

The crowd falls eerily silent, appalled by his words and his desires, gaping and staring at your trembling body and your rage which is bursting out of you and your seams are slipping and your thread is unraveling and you’re unwinding, your coiled weapons and everything splurging out of you and slicing into the open air. Then you’re moving, burning footsteps leaving imprints on the earth and everyone is shouting so quietly that your ears are full of it, full of nothing, full of war sounds. This is war. This is all this is now. There is no one you know here. There is just the enemy. 

Your fists whirl in a rampage of flying limbs and snarling and scowling and suddenly you’re hitting that disgusting smirk straight off of his face. 

No. Hitting? You’re not hitting. You’re shooting at the enemy. And the boys beside you are decorated in spindly blue uniforms and ragtag outfits and some of them are crying, but that’s okay because you’re destroying the enemy. Bam bam bam pow pow pow bang bang bang there is shooting again, and shouting again, and people are gasping but that’s not real, the war is, the war is real the war is real the war is all that’s real and it’s gone, it’s out of you, it’s everywhere now, staining the ground and the skies and the walls and the paints of the broken society and Earth is war, the Earth is a battlefield, you are the leader and he is the enemy. Enemy. Pound. Enemy. Pound. Blood. Flying through your fingers, slipping and spinning down your body and you’re laughing, shooting, laughing, shooting. Pound. They yell and yell and yell at you, enemy enemy enemy, kill the enemy, shoot the enemy, make the enemy leave us Enjolras please, the enemy, he is the enemy, please kill the enemy please save us please please please win this war Enjolras please—

You hear the enemy scream and you smile and then hands, hands on you and someone is pulling you, pulling pulling pulling. Is it the enemy? No. They’re wearing your uniform. They are your allies but they are pulling. Did you kill the enemy? That’s all you care about. Is he gone? That’s all. Is he gone is he gone he needs to be gone he needs to be dead because they’re screaming at you and if he’s not gone, if he’s not gone they’re all dead, and you’ve lost the war and you can’t lose the war because, because—

“Enjolras, Jesus Christ, snap out of it!” 

Enjolras. That is your name. You are a soldier with a name. Every soldier has a name. Does the enemy have a name? Or is he simply faceless? He opposed you. He made them cry. He’s evil and disgusting and the enemy. Did you kill him? Is he gone?

Bang bang bang pow pow pow still shooting still shouting. Someone is dragging you away and you’re screaming, and you’re crying. Sirens wail through the air and blaze across your vision in angry reds and whites and blues of synthetic color, men in different uniforms that are the enemy but not quite, pushing and pulling and yelling, dispersing the soldiers. They run and they scramble and hands, they are telling you, hands are screeching at you to run. No. Someone you know. He is yelling at you. Is it the enemy? It’s not. Is he dead? You don’t know. 

“Run, Enjolras, for fuck's sake, run!”

“I have to kill the enemy! I will not let him win the war!”

Somebody is crying and sobbing and you’re shaking, kicking and snarling against the restraints of these strong arms, breaking free and flying forward only to be yanked backwards again, this time with more force. You know this voice. It speaks again. “They’re going to come after you, Enjolras, you have to run!”

Combeferre. Combeferre. That’s Combeferre. 

“The enemy? Is he coming after me?”

“Y—yes, Enjolras, the enemy, and you have to run away, okay? Come _on_.”

“I will not run in fear of him! I will fight him!”

Scratch scrabble claw and hit and kick and punch but they won’t, they won’t let you go. Bang bang bang pow pow pow zip, zing, it is echoing and rising about you like a symphony, singing, loudly, war war war, war war war, fight fight fight, fight fight fight, and you wonder then what you’ve unleashed. Wonder what you’ve become. Monster. You’re a monster. Fight fight fight. War war war. Don’t let them drag you away. You must stand your ground and fight your war, monster. Monster, fight your war. Enjolras, fight. Enjolras Enjolras Enjolras. 

There could be a long second that becomes a lifetime - a handful of lifetimes - and each of them is every lifetime you bled for and dreamed of, in the chaos of the crowd that ceased to be a crowd, on your fourth victim, boy without a uniform stumbling across to you, boy without a uniform below your feet. The skies are navy-blue with cloud and storm and each lifetime is a long black battlefield like rolling paper, roiling and spitting and churning, and you are every man that fights and the mud they fall on and the thunder boiling over their heads and the gaps spreading wide where their wounds are, but this is all happening so quickly that you've won thrice against a reckless king and your hands are slipping against your shirt when someone pulls you away, like no-one should have the right to, no-one, what will these people do without a warrior, and where have their boys gone to rest?

Raw screams are ripping their way out of your throat, leaving your vocal chords torn and bloodied and you’re burning burning burning, so much fire, heat, all around you, swallowing you. There is red on you, all over you, screaming screaming screaming, fight your war, Enjolras. It is what you wanted, isn’t it? This war?

_This isn’t how I wanted it._

You’re being dragged. You keep hitting, someone hisses in pain, there are multiple fingers on you now, twisting into your clothing and your hair and shoving you back and back and back, until the war is blurring, until you’re not standing, you’re sitting. Sitting. Zip zip bang. Zip zip bang. It’s still yelling at you, the war, why aren’t you fighting? Is the enemy dead? The enemy the enemy the enemy. Did they die? Did you win? Is that why you can’t move, why they’re touching you light and soothing and solid? Are they congratulating you? Did you win? Did he die? Die die die? Death death death. Dying and death and death and dying and war and war and battles and war. That’s all the Earth is the Earth is a war. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. Blackness. Darkness. Emptiness. A whisper of a name, a quiet voice. Grantaire? Grantaire. Your heart hurts. Grantaire. He is here, isn’t he? No. He’s not here. Not in a war. Grantaire is not war. Grantaire is something different. Grantaire is the stars. Grantaire is the northern lights. Grantaire is not blood or battle or chaos. That is what you are. Monster. Did the enemy die? Black. Cold. Color. Black. Color. Black. Zip zip bang. 

Grantaire. 

When you look at the battlefield again it’s not a battlefield, and Combeferre is hovering worriedly above you. 

Your face is wet. Your body is heavy. You’re sitting in Combeferre’s car, with Courfeyrac and Joly in the backseat, their breathing quivering in tandem, in then out, in then out. Awakened, you blink multiple times. Your hands smell like smoke and death and you want to shiver because red. Red is on them. Blood. That’s blood. 

You didn’t…you didn’t actually fight in a war…did you?

“Enjolras,” a beacon of a voice, light and calm and reassuring. Steady hands, careful, brushing across your cheeks, your tangled hair, your shoulders. It feels like you’ve bled out. Like you’re hollow and void and just bones rattling against skin, searching for something, for a soul to grasp onto and glue the fragments together. “Are you alright?”

If you had the energy, you would be moving, sitting up fervently, fingers itching towards the door handle. You would be demanding why you’ve all left the protest, why you’ve given up, screaming for answers and reprimanding disobedience. You would be furious and fuming. But everything is out of you right now. Everything is out. You hear a brief clatter and a gunshot, but it leaves as quickly as it’s heard. 

“What happened?” you croak, because it’s the only logical thing to ask, because it’s what you don't know. Joly and Courfeyrac look between each other, sharing a knowing glance, and then, without a word, Courfeyrac glances down at his cell phone and begins typing rampantly. His fingers fly across the keys in a flurry, and it reminds you, briefly, of a battle and a fight and a war. 

Clink clink. Your bones. Searching for blood or knowledge or wisdom. Nothing. Empty-handed. 

The car splutters against the road, wheels bumping and turning as Combeferre refuses to answer you and takes to zipping down the street instead, veering sharply, driving more recklessly than you’ve ever seen him in his life. You’re gaping. Why is he running? Running running running. He’s going too fast, everything is too fast and you feel it, your pulse, thumping and thrumming against your ears and your neck, too fast. It hurts. 

Suddenly, Courfeyrac has the phone pressed up to his ear. 

“We need Grantaire. Now. Take him home and make sure he stays there until Enjolras gets back.”

Beep. Courfeyrac hangs up. His hands are shaky. He looks at you and there is something like fear in his eyes, which makes your stomach churn and sizzle and bristle. The pads of your fingertips are bursting with electricity. 

Then, it hits you. Grantaire. Grantaire who is supposed to be out at an art exhibit with Jehan. Enjoying himself. Forgetting about his troubles as he spends time with his best friend. Grantaire who isn’t supposed to hear of your protest. Grantaire, who cannot burn. Grantaire. 

“Grantaire can’t know about any of this—,” 

“It’s too late,” murmurs Joly, his eyes downcast, his hands twiddling nervously in his lap. “He already knows.”

Thump thump. There’s your pulse again. Your heart again. Surging and bursting. You don’t remember what happened in Phoenix after that man yelled at you. Why don’t you remember?

This time, when you ask it, your voice is more insistent, a mirrored image of its earlier sharpness, of its pull and its control. _“What happened?”_

Combeferre clears his throat, timidly, his fingers clenching around the wheel. He keeps his gaze fixated on the road, dares not to look at you as he speaks, cautiously measuring each word. “You lost control,” he says, treading carefully, and automatically, your gut twists.

“What do you mean I lost control?”

Joly stutters behind you, trying to keep calm but his voice clearly betrays him of that. “It wasn’t much anything, really, it’s not that bad, I’m sure you didn’t mean—,”

“Tell me the truth.”

Joly stops. Courfeyrac stops. You turn to Combeferre, the only one who will give answers, who will give anything. He lets out a breath, a slow rush of air, keeps his hands steady. “What do you mean, Combeferre?” you whisper, small, smaller than you’d thought your voice could be. 

Combeferre speaks. “You started hitting that man.” At this, your stomach plummets down to your toes and pulls and yanks and drops. Sickness roils through you, a title wave of nausea. “Enjolras, you…..you nearly killed him before we could pull you off.”

_Enjolras, you nearly killed him._  
Nearly killed him.  
Enjolras. 

You feel mangled. Bloody. That’s the red, then. That’s what that is. 

“I almost killed someone?” Your syllables crackle and die. Each word sounds like a piece of broken glass, grating against your throat, hoarse and sharp and weak. “That man?” 

Behind you, Joly swallows. Combeferre’s eyebrows draw together and the soft brown in his eyes looks glassy with something unrecognizable. “Yes.” 

Hands. Your hands feel so heavy with the indecency slathered across them. You want to chop them off. 

You splutter, shaking, trembling, feel yourself fall deeper into the seat, curling in on your shriveling limbs. This is not what was supposed to happen. The reason you came here tonight was to fight against inequality, to focus your soldiers on good, on making something of the world rather than destroying it. That’s all you’ve always wanted. To make the world into something. You always see so much wasted potential in the world, so much good when everyone else sees degeneracy and you scramble to pick up the scraps and show them, with eager eyes, that everything is not so bad. You have been the representative of what the world still is, you have tried all of your life to remind humanity that it can be redeemed. 

What will the world do now that its warrior has become nothing put a pile of ashes and dust and dirt and maddening minds?

For the rest of the car ride, you say absolutely nothing. Your face is stone and your eyes are scooped out and your lungs don’t know air. Mouth sealed into a tight line, hands gripping onto the armrest of the passenger seat and nearly puncturing the upholstery; you are the embodiment of a marble statue. Nobody speaks. 

Once Combeferre gets on the highway, he slows down to the legal speed limit. It seems you have shaken anyone who would attempt to follow you. At the very least, you don’t have to worry about being arrested. 

The only thought that is keeping you from yanking the handle of the door open and barreling into the passing cars is Grantaire. You’re swimming with the thought of him, swimming in a helpless world of obscurity, every thought of him, any thought of him. His eyes when he smiles at you, the way he holds you when you pine for another time period, the way he screams at you when you come home bloodied and beaten and broken and triumphant, brimming with rage. The words he will say when you get home. Will he be disappointed? Will he even dare to look upon you with his beautiful artist eyes, which see everything as an opportunity to be twisted into visual poetry? 

Skies are churning with thoughts of corruption and laughing at the plight of humanity, the boys in the seat behind you are too quiet with their sadness. It’s then that you know, for certain, that this time period is so wrong for you, because if you were somewhere else you could die for something and no one would flinch. Back then, no one would say a word if Enjolras were to bravely lose himself for his country, for his cause and for his war. No one would say a thing. 

The 1800s beckon and twist into your ears, singing sweetly to you, and you’re almost consumed by the overwhelming urge to throw up. 


	3. but he never even made it to his twenties

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The war is not yet over and Grantaire is the only remaining soldier.

When you finally reach your apartment, Jehan is waiting in the parking lot leaning up against a beaten up pink Volkswagen, tapping his foot lightly against the concrete and humming nervously, clear eyes round and luminous. His expression sparks to life when he sees Combeferre’s car pull into the spot close beside him, and as soon as the lot of you come shakily stumbling out of the van he rushes forward and envelopes everyone into equally bone-crushing hugs.

“Dearests,” he mutters quietly, breathing out a rush of relief into your ears, clutching tightly onto your clothing as if feeling your presence for the first time, reveling in the face of your existence. He is so musical, so light and lively and brimming with goodness that you wonder how your protest survived without him. You’re reminded then that it didn’t. “How worried I was for you all.” 

He clutches onto you longer than most, holds you, and you breathe in, then out, regularly. You haven’t spoken since you’d first awoken in Combeferre’s car, but since this here is Jean Prouvaire in your arms, there’s no way words are going to stay concealed within you. He is a magnet for them. “Is Grantaire alright?”

Gently, Jehan draws back, a sweet, melancholy smile tugging at his pretty pink lips. His vibrant eyes reflect you and you see then how sallow you look, dried blood caked beneath your fingernails and dark circles smudged carelessly underneath your eyes, like charcoal, like soot, like liquidized death. It’s horrid. “He’s fine,” he murmurs soothingly, hands kneading into your shoulders and you’ve never been so grateful for a human being’s existence as you are his, at that moment. “But he’s very worried. I think you should go up and see him”

That idea sounds like the most wonderfully destructive thing you’ve ever heard.

“Thank you,” you say to him then, because he truly deserves it. Jehan is a beacon. Where any of you would be without him is beyond you. “For taking care of him.” 

His smile grows softer with something reminiscent and a little sigh escapes him, a sweet puff of breath. “No need for thanks,” he retorts, hands finally falling from your shoulders and pressing themselves into the pockets of his turquoise cardigan, weaving the threads there, twisting them into answers so he can have everything of the universe spun quietly into the palms of outstretched hands. “Now do us all a favor and go speak to him. And then sleep. Sleep is wondrous, darling, it’s really something you should try more often.”

With that, the little poet flitters out of your vision, gone, as if he were merely a mirage, an apparition, an image conjured from lonely concrete. Although, it’d be no surprise, really, if Jehan were merely the subject of fairy tales. He’s practically an immortalized being, anyways. Untouchable. 

You hear said entity conversing quietly with Courfeyrac on the hood of his car, a private affair, and figure then that it’s best to go, to face the deafening splice of Grantaire’s war drums, his cold black darkness that envelopes you in mysteries you’ve always grasped uselessly for. The war in your head has not yet disappeared and you’re almost certain that it’s about to resurface with the sight and feel of him. Whether this is good or bad is still undecided and probably always will be. Either way, you have to face it now.

There’s no surprise in how slow and stuttering and heavy your movements are as you make your way. It’s all been too much, too fast, and that diminutive kerosene left swimming through your veins is dwindling and hardening into ice and steel. An impending sense of both dread and excitement and relief and madness whirls about you as the elevator inches slowly along to your floor, agonizingly lethargic, opening and closing to let in and let out again and again. 1 then 2 then 3 then 4, 5 then 6 then 7 then 8 and 9 and 8 and 9 and 8 and 9 and—

_10._

When the elevator door opens, it echoes. Zip, zip, bang. You swallow down a hard lump in your throat and press on. 

The door to your apartment is already unlocked. With a deep breath and shuddering veins, you step in as if it’s nothing, as if it’s been just another day, just another day or normality and society and the same the same the same of everything. Grantaire is sat at the kitchen table, which is draped in a red flag marred with bullet holes, sifting through a book he’s mostly just pretending to read. When you enter he doesn’t look, doesn’t speak. He continues to flip through the pages, reaches with steady hands for the bottle of beer beside him and takes a long, slow gulp of it. 

There’s a quiet shift of something, footsteps fluttering across hardwood coming from your hallway, and you flinch, and at the movement Grantaire’s eyes dart upward and he startles. “Jesus, Enjolras,” he mutters, book flopping carelessly onto the table as he scrapes his chair back and stands. “I didn’t hear you come in.” 

You can’t speak. Don’t speak. Your mouth is pressed into a hard line, your face is set in stone and confusion and anger. You don’t know why you’re so livid, why suddenly your fingers are flexing and curling into your palms, fingernails digging into the calloused skin, why your nostrils flare with controlled breaths. But you are. Because you are and you are and you aren’t and you are. Enjolras the monster the soldier the representative the fallen Apollo, his gold splayed out at his feet and stopped and melted and ruined. The spoils of a free world have simply been a noose and all you’ve done is hang yourself with it. 

Tentatively, Grantaire takes a few steps towards you, but you skitter backwards at his outreached hands. You cannot be touched, you will scorch someone, kill someone. You’ll kill someone. You monster monster monster, Enjolras, soldier fighter warrior monster killer. 

With a huff, Grantaire retracts, runs a hand through his mussed curls and he looks tired, oh so very tired; you want to smooth the wrinkles away from his eyes but you can’t because you just don’t feel like your hands are lively or real anymore, or even attached to your body. They’re someone else’s hands but they’re yours but they’re still stained in someone else’s blood. If you run them under hot water, maybe they’ll disintegrate and you won’t be able to destroy every time you try to rebuild. “Well,” you finally utter, and your voice comes out grating and rougher than you’d intended, coarse and worn down and fuming. “I’m home now.” 

Why are you angry? Not at him. Can’t be at him. The world. The world the world and Grantaire is in the world and he’s standing right in front of you so right now, to you, no matter how much you love him, he is the world the only world and you’re mad at the world. 

You hear the footfalls again, soft like morning snow, like winter meadows and your stomach flops and surges unsuspectingly up into your throat. Acid stings and sizzles you but with a hard swallow you force it all down. Better to stay angry always angry because that way the world can’t catch you. 

“Yeah, speaking of that,” Grantaire scoffs, and it’s like the anger is palpable, like he’s been roped into a fire and you’re both burning, and dying, and coughing, and choking and withering. “What the hell were you even thinking, leaving this place and starting shit? What made you think that was a good fucking idea anyways?” 

When the laughter escapes your lips, it comes out bitter and manic and frightening. Grantaire eyes you with an exasperated sort of anger, and you’re both just tired. Tired and angry and tired. “I was thinking of actually doing something to benefit the existence of mankind,” you reply, and at this Grantaire’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. 

“Right, almost killing a guy, that’s definitely helpful to society. Great job there, oh mighty and powerful Apollo!” he retorts, raising his bottle in a mock-toast. 

Your fingers scream with the urge to mend or fix, or maybe break and destroy, you’re not quite sure which your body has been spun for anymore. Breaths keep coming out in sporadic huffs, strangulated and wrong, and the next time you look at Grantaire all you want to do is kiss him. 

Your words betray you of this desire. “I just lost control for a moment,” you murmur, quieter this time, though the venom laced in your tone never truly deteriorates, is always lurking at the hinges of everything. Maybe that’s why you’ll never succeed in a war, because you are just terrible and you, you are the real enemy. “That’s all.”

“Lost control!” Grantaire exclaims, throwing his hands up in the air in fruitless frustration. “You did a little more than lose control, Enjolras! I just, I don’t get why you didn’t just fucking call me instead of going off and doing your reckless shit! Or told me what you were doing! Jesus, Enjolras, you didn’t even tell me!” There’s desperation in his voice now, panic and sheer worry and you see now what you’ve done to him, how you have made his face crease into anxious lines and his heart hammer and his palms sweat and his head swirl with the worst of possibilities. You didn’t tell him anything. 

He probably thought you could’ve died. 

The bile in your throat whines and rattles against its confinements, scratching like useless blackness at your lips. Your whole body lurches forward and the world spins, for a moment, black and blue and black and Grantaire, fire and burning and flame and those footsteps, louder, consistently louder as time halts and its ringing in your ears, time, time is made by man and time hates you, hate hate hate hate hate because you’re here, not there, you’re here. “I-I,” you manage to choke out, straightening yourself, pretending like you can see straight and that the world is clean and steady and meticulous and perfect, pretending you’ve got the blindfold of conformity and ignorant belief on, the blindfold you work so fervently to distinguish. “I didn’t want to bother you.” 

You wonder then what Grantaire sees in the world, because if you see wars that you need to conquer and aristocratic Cheshire smiles you were made to snuff beneath your thumb, what images does his brain conjure? Something dark, something dusky, something frigid, something twisting and twining with wild acrylics and flashing bits of color and smoke? You don’t know and how do you two stand each other? How do you two understand when you can’t break through the barriers built about your heads, tightly locked and sealed, the key tossed into some unmentionable abyss, some faraway Neverland? How do you live like this? 

“That’s a piss poor excuse, Enj, and you and I both know it,” Grantaire yells, though his voice has an inevitable ting of softness to it that it did not possess before. “You could’ve called me, called me and none of this would’ve happened. Was that fucking simple, but. Of course. You’ve never been simple.” 

The last remark sounds as if it was meant to be an insult, reprimandation, but it came out as more of a compliment than anything. Grantaire breaths out, slow, and brushes his knuckles briefly against his temple, a frantic motion. You stay quiet, quiet quiet quiet, because you’re looking at the miniscule hallway off to your left that leads down into your bedroom and _there they are_. 

They’re waltzing at the edges of your periphery now, those boys that have been tip-toeing across the hardwood all this time, their footfalls wailing and throbbing against your eardrums. Now they’re standing and clutching onto your furniture like they’re anchors in a hopeless, drowning, all-consuming sea, a sheet of black glass, obsidian, swallowing everything, meanings and science and stars and questions, everything. You want to tell them to _leave_ because you’ve just had _enough of them_ but you don’t have the heart, because they’re scrabbling at linens and blankets and sheets and trying so hard not to fall, not to die, trying so so hard and you can’t be cruel to those glittering faces, ripe and shining with blood and sweat and tears. It’s not always easy being a part of the war you’ve got yourself and those boys bathed in, and you feel their pain more realistically than anything. 

So they’re not going to leave. They’re going to be shouting at you to save them, to save humanity, while you try to adamantly hold your stance and keep up your fight all at once and….and you can’t save fabricated images and keep up reality all at once. It’s one or the other, there’s always a differentiating border, or is there really? Is it not just all clumped together into one big mesh of dissolution, now? Is that not what everything is? 

Is it not your fault that everything has broken into shattered dreams at your feet? Because you failed to win or fight or die for something? 

Churning. Churning and sliding and slicking and plummeting, your skin prickles with goose bumps and your whole body feels like everything is focused on that lurch which keeps pressing up to your throat and farther up and up and up until that’s where all the weight in your body has drifted too. Everything else feels like it will collapse because it has nothing in it, nothing nothing nothing. “Look, I was doing what I had to _do,_ ” you sputter, feel your lungs curve inwards and your body shake. “I had to, dammit Grantaire, why can’t you—I’m sorry but I _had to_.” 

“You fucking had to did you!”

And so it continues. It’s shout after shout after useless shout now, and of course, of course, because you can never escape paper battlefield dreams, not for long, even if you scrabble and scratch and kick them away. They come sliding back into place effortlessly each time, like projector images, click click, shrouding everything in dull grey-scales and the sharp pound of bullets. The only difference now is here there’s only one against one, and it’s all too imminent, too much, too fast too much too fast too much. It’s brother against brother, lover against lover, a self-fulfilled righteous prophecy that you’ve always, always forseen. Breaking point You’ve already hit it but now he’s feeling it and everyone else is tripping and tumbling over the bruises and scars marring the careful path you’ve laid out. You want to shatter the mirrors of modern men and feel their industrialized black blood slathered across your skin. You want to scream, but not at him anymore. You want to do anything other than what you’re doing. 

You’re tired of fighting. Of dodging bullets. Of hearing the boys screaming in your living room and your apartment and clawing at your windows. You can’t do it anymore. 

When you finally stop ducking and diving beneath the gunfire the bullets find you much too easily. They scream and pierce your hollow chest, and breath whooshes out of you and all of that sickness pressing up out of you and into you feels heavier than ever before.

Your body quivers. 

Grantaire stops. 

He goes quiet. Steps forward, each beat a cannon pulse, boom boom, boom boom boom bang bang. His cold gaze loses all of it sharpness and stone and steel and softens into melted glass, multicolor window–panes swirling and swooping and looping and crying. “Enjolras,” he breathes out, hands reaching, brushing against your torn shoulders. “Shit, you…you’re shaking so hard.” 

You hadn’t noticed it but when you look down, down down down at your hands they’re quivering, swaying back and forth erratically with the weight of something, of somethings and everythings. Your tremors are so violent that they shake the ground beneath your feet and everything tumbles and distorts. War. War war war. Did you fight a war? That’s a good question. You don’t know what war is anymore. Is it there, in the fray of a frenzied crowd, of the slick words and cutting phrases of an enemy, in the face of chaos and injustice? Is it here now with Grantaire, words words words words words, beating and slamming into each other, hitting and punching and kicking with verbs and nouns and adjectives? Or is it in yourself, twisted into your veins and your bones and your skin, tattooed here and there and everywhere, crying in your living room, your kitchen, dead bodies all over, never knowing what you’re doing where you’re going why you’re here or there or anywhere but just knowing you have to fix fix fix fix fix and fight fight fight fight fight? 

Anger seeps from you like it’s the blood culminated from a wound, like slippery syrup, expendable. Strength and power and will and adamancies, gone. Everything, gone. Grantaire, real. His beautiful hands, made to craft and brush and paint and splatter, settle onto your forearms and squeeze, gently, and you nearly crumble under the touch. Body shifting, knees buckling underneath you, giving way to the shadowy fields of swaying grasses beneath your feet. You’re careening down, down, downwards into the end but the bile is going up, up into the beginning and this is over, isn’t it? The end of everything you’ve fought for, everything is dying and dying and dying—

Grantaire’s hands do not leave you, even as you fall and begin to wretch the contents of your stomach onto the floor. 

You’re not sure how long you stay there like that, illness and the press of too much everything forcing your body’s excesses past your lips. You don’t know, at one point, if you’re crying or laughing or both, don’t know much of anything, really. 

The one thing you do know is that Grantaire is holding you, close and tight, and, _I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry_ , echoing and pounding, in your hair, into your neck. Eventually, he moves you, down onto something soft— _a bed_ , what’s left of your sanity tells you—whispers that he has to clean up and get you a glass of water and that he’ll be right back, he promises. You have some time to just lie there and think. 

Too much time, it seems. 

So. You almost killed an innocent man today. 

The laughter you emit is too dry. 

What is the point of a fight? Is it true, what your father always used to tell you, that peace could never be obtained if not war preceded it? Was that philosophy, one you’ve lived by since you were a child, just another lie? What is solidity, here, anyways? What is stability? Why can’t you shape the world the way you want to? Why is it that whenever you try to tell people of atrocity you end up causing more than you’d hoped to prevent? 

If you were in the 1800s everything would feel better. Clicked seamlessly into place.

That is the problem with time, though. She pretends she knows where you belong and sifts you into random mechanisms of numbers and seconds and years, sets you there and glues you, stuck to the ground of whatever type of society the world has built, whether its shaky or stable, hard or soft. She does not let you move, and she does not put you where you belong so when you want to move, you can’t, and you feel sick, and you almost kill innocent men and yell at your boyfriend for no god damn reason. 

It’s then that Grantaire returns, with a damp cloth and a glass of water. He urges you to take a sip, and grudgingly you comply. The war is a dull tune now, a song caught on loop in your head, merely background music. The presence of Grantaire stripped of all of the uniforms and just here before you, real and messy and himself, is enough to overshadow your mind for hours, for days, for lifetimes. Your hands shake less with the simple sight of him, with the soft strokes of the cloth across your sweaty forehead and your neck, screaming with heat. 

“They’re yelling at you, aren’t they. In your head.” 

The whisper is so quiet, so hushed that it almost slips past you entirely, but you catch it just before it can spindle away, and your breath falters. The world is empty, empty with the pumping pounding noise of nothingness. 

He knows. Of course he knows, he’s always known about them. It shouldn’t surprise you that he’s pointed it out, that he’s come to this realization. He’s got this knack for slithering his way into you and stealing all of your deepest secrets, smirking delightedly as he runs off with them and stows them away for some rainy day. 

You’ve calmed some now, and at these words, little more escapes you than an exasperated sigh, as you shift so that you’re propped up against the headboard, hands curled tightly around the frigid glass of water. Grantaire sits beside you on the bed, your shoulders and knees and everything brushing, his hands rubbing slow circles into your left shoulder. 

“They’ve been doing it all day,” you admit, running a hand through your hair, blinking back smoke and smog and glass. As if in affirmation of this you hear the steady beat of _save us save us save us_ coiling within your bones, crying out in desperation. This time, you do not succumb to it. 

Grantaire’s eyes flutter closed, briefly, as if in deep thought, and his hand stills on your shoulder and clutches it, hard, squeezing it for reassurance, whether that reassurance is for you or himself or both, you’re not sure. You can almost see and hear the wild thoughts dancing beneath those beautiful eyelids, tantalizing and gorgeously mad, but then they open, and they look at you calmly and thoughtfully, no trace of madness within them. “What do they listen to?” he asks, evenly. “What shuts them up, at least for a little while?” 

“You.”

The answer is automatic. 

Everything softens. Grantaire shudders in a breath, and his hands rove down and fall onto your forearms once more, curl into them sweetly. He pulls you, gentle, and tugs you so that you are facing him, legs tangled together amongst the sheets, tangible and morphing like your hearts, fusing and bursting. Grantaire rests his forehead against yours, his eyes closed, his nose caressing your own. “I’m here,” he murmurs, breath catching against your cheekbones and cradling them, softly. “I shouldn’t have left you. But I’m here now.” 

Relief. Thrumming pleasantly through you, shackles unbound, soldiers quieting to a futile roar in the back of your throat. You finally let yourself release it, the will and the need to fight. You finally let yourself settle and relax and not pulse with urges and daydreams of an unbound world. Know that it is not your duty, at least, not all yours. Know that everything is not always a war.

You’re reminded then of the only thing that’s keeping you sane in this time period. 

Your hands curl into the fabric of his battered t-shirt, eyes stinging, chest full to bursting. 

“I love you so much.” 

“You’re the only real reason I fight for anything.” 

He kisses you then, so soft and pleasant and warm, not even bothering with the fact that you haven’t yet brushed your teeth, and all of your bullets and cannons and guillotines melt into nothing but inoperable slabs of steel lying on a dormant battleground. 

When you both finally pull away, _I’m sorry_ bounds between you sporadically, exchanged and sent back again and again and again until your lips tire of whispering the words. Afterwards you lay there, curled into one another, quietly breathing, not quite sleeping nor quite awake, floating thoughtfully between reality and insanity. He strokes your long wisps of blonde hair reverently, as if it’s real precious metal, made of gold. Your heartbeat slows and steadies. 

“There’s so much war, everywhere, Grantaire. How am… am I supposed to save anyone from it?” 

The words bloom out of you, fizzle and die on your tongue as soon as you speak them. 

Grantaire’s eyes blink upon and gaze upon you, thinking, always thinking of something beautiful. “You save people every day,” he responds, his hand drifting down to the small of your back, pulling you infinitely closer, so that there is no space between your magnetic bodies. “Just by living through another one yourself."

Your hands twine deeper into him, clutching onto him, and he kisses away your softened tears.

It is like this that you fall asleep, not in a battlefield, not listening to the harsh lullabies and cadences of anthems of dying and living and dying, but tangled into something warm, swaddled by comforting arms and the stable rise and fall of a well-loved chest—breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Your heartbeats are in tandem, natural rhythm, matching each other’s. Your sickness wanes, inch by inch, second by second.

There is a war, every day, that’s true, and you end up losing each and every one of them, each and every soldier shouting and running rampant through your head always ends up being swallowed by chaos and frenzy. And the 1800s do have oh so much to offer, so much beckoning to you, more passion and glory and justified death, more causes to latch to and real wars to clench the thirst of fabricated ones, sure. It has all of those things.

But the fatal flaw of the past and the one redeeming quality of the present is here in your arms, wrapped around you and within you, breathing serenely in his sleep. There is no Grantaire in the past you crave, no Grantaire there at all, and really, if that is so, then it’s useless to want it or war or anything.

What need are wars? They don’t build you. They’d don’t mold you.

He does. 

+++++++

The next morning, when you awaken you expect to hear the usual soft hum of military boys preparing their muskets, loading their gunpowder and their cartridge balls, ramming everything into their barrels with heavy hearts and eyes glazed over by dauntless yellow skies. You expect to hear the first gunshots soon, hear a scream here, then there, about you, twisting in you, normality, always there, every morning, just like every other time, but.

You open your eyes and everything is quiet except the sleepy sounds of morning, the soft rays of light streaming in through the unveiled window falling upon the sharp angles of Grantaire’s face, bathing him in dimmed glitters of charcoal and gold. No soldiers. No battle. Nothing. Just Grantaire, eyes prying sleepily open against the light, blinking groggy and confused, his legs tangled with yours, your fingers intertwined. Just Grantaire, who, once he comes to, grumbles softly and closes his eyes again, laughs when you hit him playfully on the head with a pillow and shoves it back into your face soon after.

Just Grantaire, who kisses your forehead, who doesn’t scald or burn or hurt or kill or shoot or yell at you, who doesn’t fight like you do, who doesn’t succumb to the whims of society.

Grantaire, who looks up at you, his electric eyes illuminated by sun, by moon and stars and everything is in those eyes, everything you’ve loved and feared and wanted, everything is swirling and swooping about that mad sea of blue.

Grantaire, who smiles.

“Good morning, army dreamer.”

"Good morning.”


End file.
